English majors of the future: It may be time to consider studying something other than comparative modern literature.

A new joint major program at Stanford offers the liberal arts-inclined just that, integrating humanities and computer science in an experimental merger of left- and right-brained thinking.

The CS+X program, announced Friday, will offer undergraduates the opportunity to jointly study computer science and either English or music beginning in fall 2014. But the idea isn't just to study the two subjects separately - it's to pursue a degree that mixes both disciplines, studying topics such as computing technique in literary analysis.

It is, as Stanford English Professor Jennifer Summit put it, a crossing of the "techie-fuzzy divide."

The new program is driven in part by a demand by students - humanities students looking for a competitive edge in the job market, but also aspiring coders interested in arts and literature.

"We're seeing students who want to balance their academic passions with pragmatic considerations about their career development, and this kind of program addresses that need," said Nicholas Jenkins, associate professor of English and director of the CS+X initiative. "The intellectual landscape is changing, and the workplace landscape is changing. We're looking to help cultivate, and provide academic structure for, a new generation of both humanists who can code and computer engineers whose creativity and adaptability is enhanced by immersion in the humanities."

Computer science is already Stanford's most popular major - attracting more students each year - a sure reflection of the growing importance of the field in nearly every industry.

But the new program is also indicative of the narrowing gap between two fields of study once on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Essential to literature

Computer science has already become an increasingly essential component of literature study.

"There are scholars that look at questions of style by reading 10,000 novels through computational analysis," said Gavin Jones, professor and chair of the English Department at Stanford. "It's a really interesting moment in the history of intellectual analysis."

What is interesting about the Stanford program, though, is that it hopes the cross-pollination will work in both directions. Jones pointed to a student who has used concepts learned from studying spatial arrangements in medieval manuscripts and applied them to programs for debugging code.

'Two-way flow'

"There is a two-way flow," he said. "It's not just that we are using computers for literary analysis anymore."

At Stanford, music and computer science already have some course overlap, but English and computer science do not. Students in the joint program must complete a senior project that integrates aspects both fields. The school expects to develop other hybrid programs.

The move was a natural for the university at the heart of Silicon Valley. It was, after all, Steve Jobs that said "computer science is a liberal art."

"I think students often want to combine fields, whether it's because they have a passion for music but also for coding, or because they want to use visualization tools and hypertexts for the science fiction stories they're writing," said Jenkins.